Legal

Acceptable Use Policy

The ground rules that keep Tuppence safe for every business on it, every payer who pays them, and every agent acting for them.

Effective 8 October 2026 Last updated 8 October 2026 Version 2.1

1. Scope

This Acceptable Use Policy (“Policy”) applies to every business and user of Tuppence, including checkout and pay pages, payment links, subscriptions, metered billing, the API and SDKs, our MCP server and agent tools, the dashboard, the iPhone app and Tuppence cards. It forms part of our Terms of Service, and is published by Tuppence AI Ltd, which operates Tuppence.

Card payments on Tuppence are processed by Stripe Payments UK Ltd, and your business is also bound by the Stripe Services Agreement, the card networks’ rules and the law. Sections 3 and 4 set out, in our own words, the businesses that our payment processor and the card networks do not support or support only with approval. If their restrictions change before we update this Policy, or are stricter than it, their restrictions apply.

2. Prohibited activities

You must not use Tuppence, or allow anyone else (including an agent) to use it, to:

  • break any law or regulation, or help anyone else to do so;
  • launder money, finance terrorism or evade sanctions, including dealing with persons, organisations or territories subject to UK, UN, EU or US sanctions;
  • commit or facilitate fraud, including card testing, taking payments for goods or services you do not intend to provide, or impersonating another business;
  • process payments for another business, or let others use your account to take their own payments (sometimes called factoring or aggregation), unless you do so through Tuppence Connect with our approval;
  • take payments that are not genuine sales to genuine customers, including charging your own cards, or cards you hold for someone else, through your own payment pages or links, or entering payers’ card details on their behalf other than through a feature we provide for that purpose and with the payer’s permission;
  • get around a limit, hold, reserve or other safeguard on your account, for example by splitting payments, spreading them across several accounts, changing your payout bank account to move funds, or opening a new account after we have restricted, closed or rejected one connected to you;
  • provide false, misleading or incomplete information to us or to Stripe, including during verification;
  • evade tax, pay or receive bribes, or disguise the true nature or beneficiary of a payment;
  • infringe anyone’s intellectual property, privacy or other rights;
  • send unlawful, harassing, defamatory or threatening content through payment pages, receipts or emails.

3. Prohibited businesses

We cannot provide services to a business that sells, offers or promotes any of the following, whether or not it is legal where the business operates.

3.1 Illegal products and services

  • illegal drugs, substances designed to mimic them (including kava), and equipment for making or using drugs;
  • fake identity documents, fake references and similar services;
  • telecommunications jamming devices;
  • anything that promotes unlawful violence, or hatred or violence towards people because of a protected characteristic;
  • any other product or service that is illegal where it is sold or where the buyer is.

3.2 Adult content and services

  • prostitution, escort services, sexual massage, fetish services, mail-order brides and adult live chat;
  • pornography and other sexually explicit material, including AI-generated sexual content;
  • adult video stores, strip clubs and topless bars.

3.3 Gambling

  • games of chance, including online gambling, casino games, sweepstakes and contests, and fantasy sports with prizes;
  • competitions in video games, card games, board games or sports forecasting with money or prizes;
  • lotteries, and bidding-fee auctions.

3.4 Financial and legal services

  • ATMs, cheque cashing, money orders and traveller’s cheques;
  • debt collection agencies, and debt relief, settlement, negotiation and consolidation services;
  • peer-to-peer money transfer, payable-through accounts, shell banks and the sale of bearer shares;
  • funded proprietary trading programmes;
  • taking loan repayments by credit card;
  • credit repair and credit counselling, and credit monitoring;
  • identity theft protection, monitoring and recovery services;
  • bankruptcy lawyers, bail bonds, and law firms collecting money for anything other than their legal fees;
  • cryptocurrency mining and staking, initial coin offerings and secondary sales of NFTs.

3.5 Weapons and dangerous goods

  • illegal weapons and their parts and accessories, and lifelike replica or toy firearms;
  • explosives, and toxic, flammable, combustible or radioactive materials;
  • pesticides that must be applied by a certified professional, and research chemicals that are labelled misleadingly.

3.6 Intellectual property and counterfeits

  • counterfeit goods, and unauthorised copies of music, films, software or other content;
  • branded or designer goods sold without the brand owner’s permission;
  • goods imported or exported illegally, and anything else that infringes a trademark, patent, copyright or trade secret.

3.7 Cannabis and health products

  • marijuana and cannabis products and dispensaries, cultivation equipment and courses marketed for marijuana;
  • CBD products with more THC than the local legal limit;
  • nutraceuticals and pseudo-pharmaceuticals that are unsafe or make misleading health claims.

3.8 Travel

  • commercial airlines, cruise lines, and international charter and private airlines;
  • timeshares.

3.9 Government services

  • services offered by or for embassies and consulates;
  • government services you are not authorised to provide, or that make misleading claims about a government connection;
  • paying out government grants or economic support.

3.10 Unfair, deceptive or abusive practices

  • pyramid schemes, and multi-level marketing that pays commission for recruiting;
  • get-rich-quick schemes, low-money-down or other predatory investment opportunities, and predatory mortgage consulting;
  • fake testimonials, outrageous claims, high-pressure upselling and rewards too good to be true;
  • services that add no value, including charging for government services that are free or cheaper elsewhere;
  • selling online traffic or engagement (followers, likes, views or clicks);
  • negative-option marketing or subscriptions with unclear pricing or cancellation;
  • telemarketing and door-to-door sales;
  • suspicious remote technical support;
  • falsifying documents, or producing them to be submitted as someone else’s work.

We may also decline any other business that we decide, at our discretion, is outside our risk appetite.

4. Restricted businesses

The businesses below carry higher risk or need a licence or registration. We can support them only with our prior written approval and our payment processor’s, after extra checks and, where relevant, evidence of the licence, registration or age verification the law requires. Some are available only in some countries. Ask us before you start taking payments for any of them.

  • Content creator platforms: platforms where creators receive tips or payments, or sell exclusive content or digital goods;
  • Crowdfunding and fundraising: crowdfunding and equity crowdfunding platforms, fundraising for charitable purposes, charity fundraising with rewards, and charity raffles;
  • Dating: online dating and matchmaking services;
  • File sharing: cyberlockers and file-hosting services;
  • CBD: products with no more than a negligible amount of THC, within the local legal limit;
  • Cryptocurrency: exchanges and wallets, and first-party NFT minting, sales and marketplaces;
  • Financial services: investment and brokerage, lending, bank account funding, buy now pay later, money transmission, remittances and currency exchange, mortgage consulting, escrow, and neobanks;
  • Stored value: gift cards, pre-loaded cards, third-party stored value or credits, and in-game currency (other than for a game you run yourself);
  • High-value goods: precious metals and stones, and other high-value goods;
  • Legal weapons: firearms, regulated firearm parts and accessories such as suppressors, and other weapons such as stun guns, swords, pepper spray and machetes;
  • Pharmacy and health: online pharmacies, prescription products sold online, prescription-only medical devices, prescription delivery, and telemedicine;
  • Tobacco: tobacco products, e-cigarettes, e-liquids (including herbal and vitamin vapes) and tobacco production equipment;
  • Payment facilitation: taking payments on behalf of other businesses, which on Tuppence you may do only through Tuppence Connect with our approval;
  • Travel: travel reservation services and travel clubs, in-flight purchases and domestic charter flights.

If your business changes in a way that could bring it within sections 3 or 4, you must tell us before the change takes effect.

5. Treating payers fairly

  • Describe what payers are buying clearly and accurately, including the price, and for subscriptions and metered billing, how and when they will be charged.
  • Only save a payer’s card or charge it later (off-session) where they have agreed to it, and only within what they agreed to.
  • Make it easy to cancel a subscription and honour your own refund policy.
  • Use a business name and statement descriptor payers will recognise, so they do not dispute payments by mistake.
  • Keep your dispute and refund rates low. Unusually high rates may lead to holds, reserves or suspension.

6. Using AI agents

You are responsible for everything your agents do. You must not:

  • let an agent ask a payer for, collect, see or store the payer’s card number, CVC or PIN. Payers must enter card details only on Stripe or Tuppence hosted pages or fields;
  • try to bypass, disable or trick agent mandates, spend limits, approvals or other safeguards, including by splitting payments to avoid thresholds;
  • give an agent more access than it needs: use restricted keys scoped to the task;
  • let an agent carry out live actions that move money (charges, refunds, payouts or card spend) without a person approving them, unless you have set a mandate with limits appropriate to the risk;
  • use agents to send misleading communications, or to impersonate another person or organisation;
  • attempt to manipulate our systems or other businesses’ agents with crafted instructions (sometimes called prompt injection).

If an agent behaves unexpectedly, revoke its key or pause its mandate from the dashboard and tell us straight away. Every action an agent takes with your keys is treated as yours, as section 10 of our Terms of Service explains.

7. API keys and technical use

  • Keep secret keys and agent private keys secret, store them securely and rotate them if you suspect exposure. Never put them in client-side code or public repositories.
  • Verify webhook signatures and keep your webhook endpoints secure.
  • Stay within the rate limits in our documentation, and do not attempt to overload or disrupt the service.
  • Do not use test mode to process real payments or to test stolen card details.
  • Do not scrape, reverse engineer or decompile the service, except to the extent the law allows despite this restriction.
  • Do not probe, scan or test the security of our systems without permission. Please report vulnerabilities responsibly as described on our security page.

8. Tuppence cards and cashback

  • Tuppence cards are for business spending only. Do not use them for personal or household spending.
  • Do not farm cashback or self-deal, for example by paying your own Tuppence account with your own Tuppence card, or by spending far beyond your earnings to generate cashback. We may withhold or reclaim cashback earned this way.
  • Do not use Tuppence cards for anything this Policy prohibits, or share card details with anyone who is not authorised to use them.

9. Reporting misuse

If you believe someone is misusing Tuppence (including a suspicious payment page or payment link, or a scam), contact us immediately at support@tuppence.ai or through our contact page. If you have paid a scammer by card, also contact your card issuer as soon as possible. We read every report, but we decide at our discretion whether and how to act on it, and we may not be able to tell you what we have done.

10. Enforcement

If we or Stripe suspect this Policy has been breached, we may, at our discretion, without notice and without giving a reason:

  • ask you for information or evidence;
  • block or refund payments, hold payouts, keep a reserve, lower your limits or lengthen your settlement period, as set out in section 8 of our Terms of Service;
  • take the same steps on accounts linked to yours;
  • revoke API keys, pause agents, freeze cards or restrict features;
  • withhold cashback;
  • suspend or close your account, as set out in our Terms of Service;
  • report the matter to Stripe, card networks, law enforcement, regulators or other authorities.

We may be prevented by law from telling you why we have taken action. We may take these steps whether or not a breach is later proved, and, to the fullest extent the law allows, we are not liable for any loss caused by taking them, as section 17 of our Terms of Service explains.

We may monitor how Tuppence is used, but we do not have to, and we are not responsible for what any business or agent does with it. If we do not act on a breach, or act on it late, that does not mean we accept it or have given up our right to act later. You are responsible for any loss, fine or claim your breach of this Policy causes us, under section 18 of our Terms of Service.

11. Changes to this policy

We may update this Policy at any time, for example to reflect changes in law, risk, Stripe’s or the card networks’ requirements or our services. Changes take effect as section 19 of our Terms of Service describes: a change that restricts what you may do takes effect 30 days after we tell you, unless it is needed because of the law, Stripe, a card network or a bank, or to prevent fraud or other harm, in which case it may take effect immediately.